auto salvage auction

Salutations everyone,

I have decided to stop marketing the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to order many different reasons, the most important being that the program is directed by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to be the single most dangerous person from the partner marketing field. Hartman admits to having no experience from the business of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to directed a network of through 87,000 affiliates.

He is also the genius that brought usYahoo adverts on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the failing Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is detailed information than a strange coincidence: both claim to seem to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to prove to be allowing monkeys to controlled the zoo.

ePN should have and could have been the greatest and most profitable commission-based system that the net can have ever known, but due to the ineptitude of Hartman and the “disruptive innovation” of his boss, eBay CEO John Donanhoe the network is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN expired hundreds of partner accounts, approximately 90 stages after the program began, to order sending low quality visitors. Hartman called this visitors, “not engaged enough“. Various affiliates argue that it would seem to be extremely challenging if not impossible to shop for a new program to garner enough usable data in that short time period to make an accurate decision, but eBay seems to have done the impossible. Not only can they determine how engaged a visitor should become after coming through a partner link, but using their secret and magic metrics they can determine if that user would have purchased on eBay exclusive of the partner. This means that eBay will know whether users that i send would have bought on eBay without your participation. If they make this determination i will prove to be penalized to purchase the purchase and it could lead to you being removed from the network. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other program from the history of the world has been able to extract this article. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-i-choose-than-you-do” mentality that he can have dubbed “disruptive innovation”.

The biggest problem in consideration of the eBay/ePN network is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet detailed information complex problem is the fact that trust among affiliates has all but disappeared. Many experienced partner marketing professionals have taken their millions of buyers to Amazon.com and other smaller niche-focused sites. This means one thing to order eBay Sellers:fewer buyers to order the upcoming Christmas season. Fewer Christmas shoppers means lower sales and less-than-glowing Q4 reports. This all spells unhappiness to purchase Sellers and to buy EBAY stockholders.

As of this writing, EBAY stock is worth 61% less than it’s 52 week high. The stock is currently trading to order less that $14 per share even seeing a recent substantial “buy back” by eBay, inc.

Is this just SOUR GRAPES?

Some of it certainly is sour grapes. I miss the old eBay. I have been buying, selling and trading on eBay.com since the times when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone in light of an communication address and sent out paper invoices that you paid by paper checks. You can’t even buy from Sellers on eBay and pay by check anymore. eBay is forcing PayPal, their electronic payment processor down the throats of both Buyers and the dwindling pool of Sellers.

UPDATE: ePN and Steve Hartman Extortion Attempt

Yesterday, October 27, 2008, I was contacted via phone by Steve Hartman in relation (or retaliation) to a private email sent to the Work of the President, John Donahoe. These communication were sent regarding my concern through eBay censoring damaging forum posts. Donahoe’s fraternity assigned “Michelle” to correspond observing me and ms. friesen said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that ms. friesen wanted to get specific details information. Since I had the “attention” of John Donahoe, even if by proxy, I thought it best to quickly turn the topic to the blatant tracking errors from the ePN system. I specifically asked that the information that I was sharing not prove to be sent to ePN because they have a history or retaliating against affiliates that speak negatively about the network. Michelle violated that confidence and forwarded the messages to Steve Hartman.  Michelle, you broke our trust and you have proven to be a person of low character.  I hope your Mother is pleased.

On October 27, 2008, at 3:42 PM CST, Steve Hartman called me since 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s college and about posting painful comments on forums. We spoke to purchase a little over 47 minutes and he is saying things like, “I will not let i threaten the company that I work to shop for…” and “I am running a business here…” I explained to Hartman that I had a client waiting and that I would call him back from an hour.

I called him back and we spoke for another 28 minutes and it was really just additional info of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited partner marketing experience, contends that the visits that I am sending is of low features and/or not properly engaged thinking about eBay. In the 6 months that I have been promoting eBay through the eBay Partner Network I have sent 430 new users. 215 of them are active on eBay. I have also sent eBay $13,137.11 in bid revenue and an estimated $100,000.00 + from Seller revenue. If you do some conservative estimates on this i can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay in excess of a quarter of a million dollars from revenue from the next six months. If this visits is not engaged then what is?

In talking understanding Hartman I was able to glean on bit of details. eBay is not looking for affiliates to send repeat buyers through their partner network. They are looking to purchase an affiliate to send a new user that buys a product instantly and then continues to come to eBay exclusive of the partner and continues to buy. This means that they (eBay) do not choose to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they beg that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy in what ePN says from one place versus what they say in another and I could write a small book on just that flaw from their system. The interesting thing here is that when an affiliate send a visitor to eBay a cookie is set. This cookie lasts to buy 7 days. A users who comes back on day 4 and buys something is therefore considered to not seem to be engaged and the partner is penalized to order that action.

The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Bloggers come to eBay looking for one thing and then scour to shop for other things and very often buy something totally unrelated to anything. It is a giant Yard Sale and that is what bloggers do, right? Well, if one is a partner and your users a following that natural tendency to shop i will seem to be penalized by ePN.

So How Was I Extorted?

On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an communication from IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would be allowed to stay in the ePN system was to do the following:

* Shut down test account
This test account was setup so that I could participation then root out a scammer that is still stuffing cookies. Why has ePN not stopped this when the scammer is using PayPal to process his subscriptions to acookie stuffing script?

* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN - both yours and your associates
Steve Hartman wants me to give him the names and accounts of my friends, why? So that he can retaliate against them because I am speaking out about his inability to function as an affiliate network director.  That will Never happen!

* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It can have been proven that eBay hates unpleasant publicity.  So now they beg my forum accounts so that they can hire tools to post “warm fuzzies” from the same forums. Read: eBay censors forums

* Full disclosure of any history seeing other affiliate networks
OK, so now Steve Hartman wants me to tell him what other partner program I am using? Why?  So that he can try to get me “expired” form those. Again, not gonna happen!

* Improve quality of partner traffic
Since this is the last thing on his list I will assume that it is the least important.

It seems that Steve Hartman is more interested in my forum activity and my friends than from the quality of the visitors going to the ePN network.

Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any detailed information unpopular publicity incidents, threats of damaging publicity, etc., or we’re not getting full disclosure on the above, then this is not the beneficial relationship we’re working to have in light of our affiliates and we’ll terminate the relationship.” This means that if I say anything bad about eBay or ePN that they will terminate my account. Are i kidding me? So I am supposed to sit idly by and download something lost awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…

Then there is this little jewel, “One last point in consideration of regards to communication, in get to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship with you as we do with other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that i not contact anyone directly within my team.” Ok Steve, let me understand this. I don’t need “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size really works a partner have to become before they are allowed to contact the ePN staff? If a smaller partner has a problem they are supposed to do what? Quietly deal in consideration of it from their own way and in their own space?

Why did I write this?

Basically, I wrote all of this to say, “STAY AWAY from eBay and additional info specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not to order the reasons that you might think. I am not upset that the “relationship” in light of ePN did not work out. I am upset that hundreds if not thousands of honest affiliates working earnestly to send visitors to eBay have been caught from this net of insanity that has been created.

I know that i will read this and I beg to let i know that I will seldom stop posting disconcerting buyer complaints about you and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that you call a business. I had the opportunity to build a positive relationship thinking about me and i chose to try and get me to rat out my associates from some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining from a wrecked network. My trust and integrity are worth far specific details than that. I have created 6000 variations of this message and they will become posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-features traffic that i abhor so much. If my experience causes one person to think twice about buying from an eBay Seller or about joining ePN then I feel that I have done my job, but I think my words will seem to be much specific details far-reaching than that.

Steve, if i would like to publish a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that you have screwed observing your idiotic metrics you can do so on in the very forum that begat this fiasco.